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BlockFi Takes 5% Stake in Grayscale’s $4.8B Bitcoin Trust

The crypto lender is only the second firm to disclose such a large GBTC stake, after Three Arrows Capital.

By Danny Nelson

Updated Sep 14, 2021, 10:24 a.m. Published Oct 27, 2020, 7:45 p.m.

Crypto lender BlockFi has become one of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust’s (GBTC) biggest whales.

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BlockFi holds 5.07% of Grayscale’s $4.8 billion bitcoin trust, or 24,235,578 GBTC shares, according to Tuesday Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. Grayscale is owned by CoinDesk's parent firm Digital Currency Group.
CEO Zac Prince said in a press statement BlockFi’s “significant” GBTC position will “add value” to the “marketplace for liquid and illiquid” shares. “There are lending markets related to GBTC,” he told CoinDesk in an email.
Crypto fund manager Three Arrows Capital is the only other entity with comparable GBTC holdings, having amassed over 21 million shares by June. That represented a 6.26% stake in GBTC at the time.
Entities are required to publicly disclose ownership positions over the 5% threshold. GBTC became an SEC reporting company in January.

Grayscale BlockFi

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.